The leader in the flagship - NetEye Nighthawk X8 (R8500) router out of the box and a short review
The episode: In the Jingdong 618 this year, the R8500's discount was unprecedented, which also triggered a big upsurge of buying. However, following this, a series of problems erupted. There are many communication platforms such as Post Bar, Koolshare Forum, and the official community. Many netizens stated that the R8500 product that was purchased had lost wireless signals and the rate was not up to the standard. Unlimited restarts and other issues, and some people suspect that this batch of products has quality defects. Xiao Bian's hands started from the beginning of the 618 period. After a period of time, the most serious problem emerged - infinite restart. While contacting the official after-sales service, the customer service also stated that there is no technical means to solve the problem of “infinite restartâ€, and only contact with the merchant to return the goods. Helpless, Xiao Bian can only deal with replacement, but also hope that the net product quality control will not appear this omission.
The Nighthawk X8 (R8500) router is a net product with a high degree of consumer interest. It has a triple-band WiFi, a 1000Mbps 2.4GHz frequency band, and two 2166Mbps 5GHz frequency bands. It has an overall bandwidth of 5.3Gbps. 4 active antennas plus 4 built-in antennas for a total of 8 antennas in a luxurious configuration. In addition, the R8500 also supports services such as Link Aggregation, ReadyCloud Cloud Service, and Net Ghost remote access, and incorporates technologies such as MU-MIMO technology and dynamic QoS. These technologies make the R8500 a super large-sized home and small business office. Use one of the router's preferred products.
First, the product appearance:
The mesh R8500's volume is relatively large, with an official dimension of 316×264×61 mm and a weight of 1.68 kg.
The wavy design at the top, the uneven look is quite unique, but this design can win the user's favor varies from person to person.
The four active antennas are one of the main highlights of the aircraft. It supports multi-angle rotation adjustment and adapts to different environments such as large areas or multiple floors to achieve better signal coverage.
There are three physical buttons on the front right side. They are “LEDâ€, “WPSâ€, and “WIFI†shortcut switches. When used, there will be a light to indicate whether the corresponding function is enabled, which is convenient for the user to quickly view and operate quickly.
On the back you can see one WAN port and six LAN ports, and one port and two ports also support link aggregation. Adapt to users with higher transmission rate requirements.
The right front end has a USB 2.0 interface and a USB 3.0 interface, which can realize a simple NAS storage service and make it more convenient for users to build a home data center. At the same time, the router supports ReadySHARE easy-to-share printing function. Simply connect the printer with the USB interface of the router, and then use the computer equipment in the LAN to achieve wireless printing, which is convenient for many corporate users.
There are non-slip mats in the bottom corners and some product information is recorded on the label.
For accessories, NETGEAR R8500 is equipped with a power adapter and a Gigabit cable, as well as product manuals, warranty cards, and more.
Second, the router settings:
Router background:
The background home page shows the current working status of the router for quick viewing:
The wireless network settings are also very detailed:
However, note that some common settings are placed under the "Advanced" tab at the top of the page. For example, Link Aggregation is set to "Advanced" - "Advanced Settings" - "Terminal Port Aggregation":
The router's firmware upgrade is in the "Advanced" - "Manage" - "Router Upgrade" tab, either through the computer to download the firmware and upload to the router to upgrade, you can also click on the "detection" in the upper right corner to make the router itself Search on the server for new firmware can be updated:
NETGEAR genie:
The NETGEAR Wizard is the client of the NETGEAR and can implement most of the commonly used router settings.
At the same time, NETGEAR ELF also has a mobile phone, which is also rich in functionality and supports Android and iOS devices.
Third, the product features and related tests:
The R8500 is equipped with a number of advanced wireless transmission technologies. Xiaobian first briefly introduced these technologies and tested some of them for direct testing. However, before starting, there is an important setting to test that will have an important effect on the signal strength of the wireless network.
Effect of regional selection on signal strength test:
Although there is a strong hardware configuration, the strength of wireless signals is still constrained by another factor - regulations. Due to different national conditions, each country has different restrictions on wireless transmission power. The upper limit of the emission power stipulated by our country’s laws is not high compared with some countries such as North America and Australia, and the products of well-known router manufacturers in the world generally follow the relevant regulations when entering China, limiting the power to below In contrast, some domestic small brands do not strictly abide by national standards and allow products to work at higher than the specified upper limit. This results in some consumers having “significantly better international routers than domestic small brandsâ€. This illusion.
The NETGEAR R8500 products also strictly follow the relevant regulations in China, and limit the wireless transmission power within the specified power. At the same time, certain restrictions are imposed on the regional selection of domestic products. It is feasible to increase wireless transmission power by changing the area selection. However, Xiao Bian emphasizes that the consequences of the opening of this function must be borne by itself. The tutorial method of opening the area selection function described below is only for learning and communication.
By using the Telnet command, you can enable the R8500 locked area selection function and query the current maximum transmit power of the R8500. Therefore, the Telnet function of the computer system and the router system must be turned on first.
Win7/8/10 users can enable the Telnet function of the system through the control panel - program - start or close the Windows function - "Telnet client" option ticked.
The Telnet function of the router needs to be enabled through the R8500's debug management page. The address of the router's debug page should be http://router IP/debug.htm, where the router IP needs to be entered according to your own actual situation. After logging in, you can see the “Enable Telnet†option at the bottom of the page. After this option is checked, the router's Telnet is enabled.
After the above steps are completed, you can open the Command Prompt (CMD) application on the PC and enter the telnet test port command: telnet routing IP and enter the Telnet interface.
In the router background setting interface, if the area selection is gray and cannot be operated, in the Telnet interface, enter: cd sbin and then enter: burnsku 0x0004 to enable the area selection function. After the router is turned on, the background setting interface is as follows:
In the Telnet interface, enter the command: wl txpwr_target_max to query the maximum power of the router working in the current mode. Although there is no unit after the value, the value is enough to show the huge difference in different regional settings. For example, when the "area selection" is set to "China", the maximum transmit power of the R8500 is 12.00 12.00 12.00 12.00.
In order to understand the working mode of the router more comprehensively, Xiao Bian tested the maximum power of all regions in the R8500 “area selection†one by one through the Telnet command, and summarized the data in the following table (since the information fed back by each region is four identical values. , Xiao Bian only lists one here to indicate:)
(The order in the table is sorted by numerical value in ascending order. There may be slight differences in the above values ​​for different versions and batches of products)
It can be seen that the launch power in North America, Australia, and Taiwan is relatively high. In order to confirm that this setting does affect the WiFi signal strength, Xiao Bian used the Wifi analyzer to test the wireless signal strength received by the mobile phone before and after the R8500 “zone selection†was switched from “China†to “United States†over a certain distance. Change as follows:
Because the wireless signal environment of Xiao Bian's area is more complicated, we specifically show each change of the R8500 tri-band signal as follows:
At a further point further, similar results were measured:
It can be seen that after the “regional setting†was changed from “China†to “United Statesâ€, the routers were briefly adjusted and the signal strengths of the three bands were improved to varying degrees (where the 2.4G signal seems to have undergone a restart process. Therefore, there is a short-term signal loss. Among them, the signal strength of the 2.4 GHz band is the most obvious, followed by 5G-1, and the 5G-2 is only slightly improved.
From this we can basically confirm that the router's "area selection" does have an impact on its transmit power and signal coverage strength, and the tests later in this article will also be based on the router's best working status.
Product main features:
1, 4 active antenna + 4 built-in antenna design
One of the biggest selling points of NETGEAR R8500 is the first active antenna design. It has 4 external active antennas and 4 internal antennas to expand the signal coverage. In general, a passive antenna refers to an antenna that only includes a receiving antenna module, and an active antenna refers to an antenna that integrates a receiving antenna module, a low-noise amplification module, and a power supply module.
With the introduction of the official website, the development speed of the router is very fast, and its WiFi transmission power is also getting stronger and stronger, but the WiFi signal transmission effect of mobile devices lags far behind the router. Such a huge gap makes the WiFi network Trial experience greatly reduced. The active antenna technology can effectively improve the situation. The netware moves the WiFi amplifier from the main board position to the top of the antenna. These active antennas can reinforce the signal strength transmitted from the mobile terminal within the antenna to avoid the antenna and the mainboard. Loss of signal between, improve WiFi performance.
Signal strength test:
A. 1 meter in front of the router is unobstructed:
B. 90° to the left of the router, 6m, two non-load-bearing walls (wooden walls)
C. The left front of the router is about 45°, 25 meters away, and it is separated by three non-load-bearing walls (wooden walls)
As a result, even if the R8500 is deployed in the corner of the company, all regions of the company have very good signal strength. Such excellent signal coverage is truly amazing. It can be seen that the 8-antenna design does provide a solid hardware-level guarantee for the signal coverage of the R8500.
2, 3 band 5.3Gbps transmission
Tri-band and quad-stream are another big selling point of NETGEAR R8500. R8500 has one 2.4GHz frequency band and two 5GHz frequency bands (5G-1 is 5.2GHz frequency band and 5G-2 is 5.8Ghz frequency band). All three transmission frequency bands use 4x4 transmission technology, in which the highest wireless transmission frequency is 2.4GHz frequency band. The speed is 1000Mbps, the highest wireless transmission rate of 2 5GHz frequency bands is 2167Mbps, thus the overall speed reaches 5300Mbps. .
In the tri-band architecture, the 2.4G and 5G-1 signals are placed on the positive and negative poles of the active antenna, and the 5G-2 signal is placed on the built-in 4x4 patch antenna.
3, dual-core processor
In the general usage scenario, the configuration of the data processing unit of the router product will not become a short board, and a single-core processor is sufficient, but since the R8500 has three-frequency and four-stream performance, multi-user MIMO technology, six Gigabit With a series of technologies such as LAN ports, the operating power of the processor under a large workload is still very high, so the R8500 uses a 1.4GHz dual-core processor to meet more demanding usage scenarios.
4, Smart Connect
Smart Connect is a function often provided by multi-frequency routers. It allows multiple frequency band signals of a router to be combined into one SSID. When a user connects to the network, the router allocates the signals based on the distance and maximum bandwidth of the mobile device. Excellent frequency band.
On the R8500, Smart Connect can merge two 5GHz networks into one wireless network name (SSID). When multiple devices are connected to the network, the router will automatically assign wireless devices closer to the router to On the 5G-2 network, because the built-in 4×4 antenna used by the 5G-2 network has the best connection quality in the near-field small-scale unobstructed case; at the same time, the router will be far away from the wall and block the wireless The device is preferentially allocated to 5G-1 because the external 4x4 active antenna used by the network has a wider coverage and better through-wall performance.
The advantage of doing so is that users do not need to consider which network should be connected to get a better signal. Just connect the network and the router will automatically allocate the user equipment to the most suitable frequency band.
The Smart Connect function's switch is under the "Wireless" tab. It is a relatively inconspicuous position. It is turned off by default. Check it and apply it to open it.
5, Dynamic QoS
The dynamic QoS (dynamic QoS) provided by the NETGEAR R8500 is optimized for games and video streaming tasks. When there are multiple devices and many different tasks use the network at the same time, dynamic QoS will determine the user's ongoing tasks according to different devices and different applications, and then use bandwidth allocation and priority delivery techniques to automatically serve such as online games. Applications that are particularly sensitive to network latency, such as video streaming, are allocated more bandwidth while ensuring that low-priority applications continue to operate.
In fact, there are many similar technologies. Almost all aspects of the entire data transmission have similar technical applications. For example, the "Killer" network card that is popular with players has the same distribution of game data priorities. The system software for mobile phones and some notebook computers is also available. There are similar optimizations at the usual level. The R8500's official QoS feature advertises application-level monitoring and bandwidth allocation, so Xiaobian also tested how effective Dynamic QoS can be in several common usage scenarios.
1. Settings interface:
This function can be enabled under the Dynamic QoS function tab on the left side of the background, and the database is optimized due to Dynamic QoS function and bandwidth and update performance.
At the same time, after the Dynamic QoS function is enabled, you can click the device name from the link at the bottom of the page or the “Connected Device†tab on the left side to view the main program that each device on the network is running.
It is noted that Blizzard Battlenet's "Battle.net" has been identified, and that NetApp claimed that program level monitoring is not a boast. However, several major processes of Thunder are identified, but the download process that really occupies the bandwidth is classified as "Others". It seems that the mastery of domestic software data is not perfect.
2. Scene measurement:
1. Open the game when downloading at full speed on a wirelessly connected computer:
Turn off Dynamic QoS:
Open Dynamic QoS:
Conclusion: There is no difference whether Dynamic QoS is enabled or not. The game is disconnected from the server. In the above picture, it seems that the Ping value has improved, but it is not. Whether or not Dynamic QoS is enabled, the game will be delayed after the Thunder starts full-speed download mode. The game will be unable to operate and will disconnect the server after a few seconds. . Therefore, the Ping data in the above two figures does not have a comparative significance, but Xiao Bian's interception before the game disconnected, witnessing the delay in the process of soaring (here also had to be filled with emotions that Thunder snatches the terrifying power of bandwidth).
2. Open download tasks and games between the two devices with network cable connection and wireless connection
Conclusion: In the two devices respectively using network cable connection and wireless connection, no matter which one is playing at full speed and the other is playing, whether or not Dynamic QoS is enabled, the game runs smoothly, with two network cable connections and wireless connection. Equipment does not seem to affect each other.
3. In two devices connected to the same wireless network, one starts full-speed download and the other opens the game:
Turn off Dynamic QoS:
The game's Ping value is basically above 300, and game operations are obviously stuck. This is "fatal" for FPS games.
Open Dynamic QoS:
When the download task is almost full of speed, the game equipment operates smoothly and is almost unaffected. After the other device pauses the download and restarts the download, the Ping value briefly rises for one or two seconds, but the maximum does not reach 100, and only lasts for one or two seconds, then quickly falls back and stabilizes below 30.
Conclusion: When multiple devices are connected to the same wireless network, enabling Dynamic QoS can really improve the network bandwidth allocation and make the gaming experience basically unaffected by other devices.
6, MU-MIMO
MU-MIMO is called Multi-User Multiple-Input Multiple-Output, which is called "multi-user Multiple Input Multiple Output". It allows wireless routers to communicate with multiple wireless terminals at the same time. In contrast, SU-MIMO (Single-User Multiple-Input Multiple-Output), which is currently widely used, allows only a single antenna to communicate with a single device at the same time. When the device is connected to the network, the SU-MIMO device needs to switch the communication with multiple devices in a very short time. In comparison, MU-MIMO communication efficiency is much higher, and it is also more effective in fully utilizing network capacity. This is also the mainstream direction of future development.
However, MU-MIMO requires not only router support but also mobile device support. Therefore, when buying long-distance mobile devices such as routers and mobile phones, you can focus on devices that support MU-MIMO.
The setting of MU-MIMO function is hidden deeper, and it is also enabled after the router is in the "Advanced" - "Advanced Settings" - "Wireless Settings" tab at the bottom of the router.
7, easy to share
The easy-to-share ReadySHARE feature allows users to provide shared storage on a local area network via a USB connection to a USB flash drive, or to connect printer devices for convenient printing. The ReadySHARE Vault feature provides automatic continuous or scheduled backups of your Windows computer.
The easy-to-share ReadyCLOUD feature allows users to remotely access the USB storage device connected to the router's USB port from the Internet and easily build a personal cloud disk.
Below, we simply use U disk to test easy sharing. After connecting a USB 3.0 USB flash drive to the router's USB 3.0 interface, enter the router's back-end “easy-to-share†tab to see some basic information about the newly connected storage device:
Users can click on "Edit" to perform detailed function settings, and can see that sharing is easy and provides multiple ways to access this storage space:
Test the USB3.0 U disk on the computer connected to the network cable to achieve the speed through sharing:
Read data about 85MB/s:
Write data about 41MB/s:
It can be seen that this speed is still considerable. Easy sharing can indeed meet the needs of shared storage to a certain extent for ordinary home use.
Fourth, summary:
The Netgear R8500 router brings amazing signal strength and coverage with powerful hardware configuration, and it also adds many top-notch technologies and powerful features.
4 active +4 internal antenna design with dual-core processor, to achieve a tri-band 5.3Gbps ultra-high wireless transmission rate; Although the background setting interface still has room for optimization, but has a good desktop, mobile client software support, it is worth Certainly; Smart Connect has realized 5G frequency band communication intelligently allocating the frequency band, let users be more relieved; Dynamic QoS function can't realize the "program level" Precise control bandwidth allocation, but when a plurality of apparatuses use a certain wireless network at the same time It is impressive to noticeably improve the network delay. MU-MIMO is more of a future-oriented design. When more and more mobile devices begin to support this technology, the utilization efficiency of the network will be extremely high. Land promotion; user-friendly easy sharing can also bring more convenience to ordinary users to build simple shared storage, cloud storage, etc.
All of these make the NETGEAR R8500 more adaptable and more playful. At the same time, this flagship product released two years ago knows that today it can still be a leader in its class.
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